Batman/Superman #1 Shows Promise But Not Greatness

Greg Pak and Jae Lee this week launched Batman/Superman, one of DC’s two most-anticipated titles of the year, the other being the recently-launched Superman Unchained. And like Unchained, Batman/Superman shows a lot of potential–but tries to accomplish a little too much in the first issue and, combining that with an artist who doesn’t seem quite at home with the tights-and-flights crowd, feels a little off-base.There’s a lot of good to be had in this first issue, but it’s far from perfect.Greg Pak’s character-driven script works pretty well, delving into a little of what drives both Superman and Batman in the opening pages, and giving Superman a bit of a lesson in humility when, disguised as Clark Kent, he believes himself to have gotten one over on the supposedly-incognito Bruce Wayne.That Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent meet before Batman and Superman ever do feels like a story beat that’s been explored before–but I can’t remember just where. In any event, it works nicely, especially in that–at least so far–they don’t know one another’s secrets just yet.

• If Jonathan Kent was alive after Superman was Superman on Earth 2, does that mean that the Earth 2 of the New 52 is more like the post-COIE earth than ours?
• After Catwoman awoke, apparently totally unaware of her location or what she’d been doing, did anyone ever tell her that she had apparently committed three murders earlier in the week?
• For that matter, Batman didn’t seem to recognize Superman at all when they first encounter one another. A guy who can leap tall buildings and shoot fire from his eyes seems pretty likely to garner media attention, so are we suggesting that Catwoman existed in costume before Superman had been around for long enough that anybody much noticed him? That seems odd, especially after making Superman “the first” was one of the big things DC wanted to do by removing the JSA generation.

The difficulty is that the whole issue just felt…confusing. I like Jae Lee’s work on specialty projects like Before Watchmen, but was skeptical that he was a good fit for something so mainstream as Superman and Batman, and this issue (or the first eighteen pages, which he drew, with Ben Oliver taking over the last few pages) did little to win me over.In the final pages of the story, the pair are brought to Earth-2, which I know only because I’ve seen the solicitations for the next issue. Other reviews I’ve read have suggested that they were shunted to their own future, so the signal was clearly not sent wide and strong. And the confusion that Superman feels when he’s thrown into a situation where he’s fighting a second Batman, this time in Smallville, with a totally different costume and who is (to his ears) ranting at him like a maniac (Earth-2’s Batman thinks that he’s Earth-2’s Superman, and so talks to him as a familiar person) is mirrored by the sense of disconcert that came through much of the issue’s art.While they might have been going for that feel–in which case, they succeeded admirably–it’s hard to shake the impression that it’s just a muddy and confusing book for me. Even the pages where the layouts were clever and the art itself beautiful, it just didn’t feel quite right and Pak’s writing, very quiet and character-centric, didn’t quite offset the parts that didn’t work for me.On a second and then a third reading, it was clearer and more enjoyable–but it seems to me that many fans wouldn’t go that far.